Heaven and Hell: What Really Awaits Us?

Opening: The pictures we grew up with

Ask most people — Catholic or not — to describe heaven and hell, and you’ll get the same two cartoons. Heaven is a reward you earn for being good enough: a prize at the end of a long test. Hell is a torture chamber for people who failed the test. Both pictures have some truth buried in them, but neither is really what Revelation shows us. And it matters, because if we’re only running from a threat or chasing a prize, we can miss the actual point of the Christian life, which was never a test to pass but a relationship to enter.

What heaven actually is

Revelation gives us two extended pictures of heaven, and they agree on one thing above all else. In Revelation 7:9-17, an uncountable multitude “from every nation, race, people, and tongue” stands before the throne, and God himself “will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” In Revelation 21, developed at far greater length, the New Jerusalem comes down from God, and “God’s dwelling place is with the human race… he will always be with them.” Different images, same center: heaven is not primarily a reward mechanism. It is fellowship with God — full, unbroken, face-to-face nearness to the One we were made for.

That intimacy is underlined in a striking way: the New Jerusalem is called the Bride of Christ (Revelation 21:2). Not a trophy case. A bride — the language of covenant love, of belonging to someone and being delighted in.

The cube that says everything

Revelation 21 draws its imagery from the Jerusalem temple — the place where Israel, going back to Eden, had access to God’s presence. John makes the connection unmistakable with one detail: the New Jerusalem is a perfect cube (Revelation 21:16). Search the Old Testament for anything else shaped like that, and you find exactly one thing: the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of the temple, itself a perfect cube (2 Chronicles 3:8).

The Holy of Holies was the most restricted space in Israel’s whole religious life. God’s presence dwelt there in fullness, and only the high priest could enter — once a year, on the Day of Atonement, and even then not without careful preparation and blood. For everyone else, the closer you wanted to get to God, the more restricted your access became.

The New Jerusalem takes that single, once-a-year, one-man privilege and makes it the ordinary inheritance of every redeemed person, forever. The whole city is the Holy of Holies now. What was rationed to one priest on one day is thrown open to all of us, always. That is what heaven is: maximum possible nearness to God, permanently.

So what is hell?

If heaven is nearness to God, hell — on this reading — is simply the absence of it. Revelation gives us two images for this: the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14-15) and exclusion from the city’s gates (Revelation 22:14-15). It’s worth being honest about how these two images relate to each other, because the text doesn’t flatly state they’re identical — that’s an interpretive connection, though a reasonable one. Revelation 21:8 places the list of the condemned right alongside “the lake that burns with fire,” immediately before introducing the New Jerusalem. So it’s fair to read these as two angles on the same ultimate reality — final separation from God pictured now as fire, now as standing outside the city gates — without claiming Revelation spells out their relationship with more precision than it actually offers. Part of reading Scripture well is learning to sit with that kind of honest, careful “this is likely what’s meant” rather than forcing false certainty.

What does hell actually consist of, then? Not arbitrary torture inflicted from outside, but the loss of everything that flows from being near God. Hope, joy, peace, purpose, forgiveness — we tend to think of these as things we generate ourselves, but their true source is God. Right now, in this life, we experience many of these goods even without fully turning to him, because this present age is the season in which God is, in a sense, courting us — patiently drawing us toward himself. But that season isn’t endless. A moment comes when the courtship ends, and after it there are only two possibilities: with God, or without him. No third option. And without him, what’s left isn’t neutral — it spirals: unforgiveness, bitterness, hopelessness, fear, feeding on themselves forever. God does not force anyone into fellowship. If someone, to the very end, does not want to be fully his, he lets them go — but the going has a name, and Revelation calls it hell.

A word about how we talk about this

It’s tempting to use hell mainly as a scare tactic: repent, or else. Given everything above, that claim isn’t exactly false — there really is something to be avoided. But it badly misses the point, and it risks misrepresenting the Church’s own character in the process. Fear and manipulation to force compliance are, in Revelation’s own terms, the marks of the beast (see our session on the Unholy Trinity) — not of the Bride of Christ. The Church’s defining mark instead is testimony, given as witness (see our session on the Two Witnesses): an invitation extended out of love and truth, not a threat wielded to keep people in line. We are called to speak honestly about what is truly at stake — precisely because we love people — never to frighten people into a relationship that, by its very nature, cannot be coerced.

An honest word about purgatory

Catholics hearing all this will naturally ask: where does purgatory fit? It’s worth naming honestly rather than sidestepping. Revelation, as we’ve read it here, describes two final destinies — full fellowship with God, or the absence of it — without describing any intermediate process of purification after death. The Church’s teaching that some who die in God’s friendship, but still imperfectly free from the effects of sin, undergo a final purifying before entering heaven’s full presence, is drawn primarily from other biblical texts and from the Church’s ancient practice of praying for the dead — not from Revelation. That’s not because Revelation quietly disagrees; it’s because Revelation is answering a different question, at a different level of resolution. It tells us the ultimate, final shape of reality — with God forever, or without him forever — without addressing what the road to arriving there fully looks like for someone who dies in God’s friendship but not yet fully conformed to him. Revelation isn’t ignoring purgatory or contradicting it. It simply isn’t the book that was written to settle that question, one way or the other.

Living this

Both heaven and hell, rightly understood, point us to the same place: to God himself as the source of every good thing we have, and to the fact that eternity is fundamentally about whether we want to be near him. That reframes the whole Christian life. It isn’t primarily about passing a test or dodging a punishment. It’s about a relationship being formed now that either deepens forever or is refused forever. Every Mass, every sacrament, every act of prayer is God continuing to draw close in this present “courtship” — and our answer matters.

Closing

The popular pictures — heaven as prize, hell as torture chamber — aren’t wrong so much as too small. What Revelation actually shows us is a God who wants nothing more than to be fully with his people, who has already opened the Holy of Holies to anyone willing to come, and who will, in the end, honor the choice of anyone who would rather not. Heaven is not a reward we earn. It is a Person we’re being invited to.

For preparation

Discussion questions:

1. How does picturing heaven as “fellowship with God” rather than “reward for good behavior” change the way you think about your own daily faith?
2. What does it mean to you that the Holy of Holies — once open to one priest, one day a year — is now open to every believer, always?
3. Where have you seen hell used mainly as a scare tactic in preaching or catechesis you’ve experienced? How might we speak about it more the way Revelation frames it — as the tragic absence of the God who loves us — without softening its seriousness?
4. How does understanding purgatory as an answer to a different question than the one Revelation is asking help you hold Scripture and Church teaching together without tension?

Hymn suggestions:

• “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones”
• “For All the Saints”
• “Be Thou My Vision”
• “How Great Thou Art”